Is it just me or does it seem like the bitcoin "craze" has died down a lot? Not as much people active in talking about it, and especially in other forums for altcoins, there used to be a lot of buzz and excitement but not any more it seems

Most of altcoins - more specifically the ones released this year were pump and dump scams. I would say that less than 5% of the coins released this year are legit and have future potential. People are figuring this out, and alts have become a disgrace to the btc community.

I would say that all altcoins have zero long term potential. They are not adding any kind of value to bitcoin in general and doing nothing more then sucking away value from bitcoin and putting it into obvious altcoin scams.

The few altcoins that have been successful in the past have survived only because they were the first of "their kind" even though the differences from bitcoin were very small

People still seem to be willing to put money into altcoins. They always hope to pick that one altcoin which turns out to be a 'bitcoin-killer'.

They are speculating. They are incorrect

They are speculating... and correct...Because only decentralized and anon crypto can compete against Apple and Google...(And Bitcoin is neither decentralized or anon).

Bitcoin is about to run smack into a wall called ApplePay... and offers no advantages over ApplePay.

"So if the bitcoin industry really wants to take on Apple Pay, it has to reinvent itself.Make itself friendly. Market itself to people so technologically ignorant that they’reone step away from microwaving their iPhones. That’s a difficult task to pull off."

You do not need to have an anon coin in order for it to be successful. You can also essentially make yourself anon when spending/buying/selling bitcoin for a small fee to bitcoin fog/bitmixer/other mixing service.

It is not possible to completely decentralize mining as someone who has a large amount of mining capacity could simply broadcast their found block from another IP address each time they find a block in order to make the network look decentralized. Also a semi centralized mining network is what is expected when a coin is successful, as even satashi predicted this.

The disadvantage that apple pay has over bitcoin is the fact that it still has the higher costs of using a credit card. All that apple pay adds to the equalization is convenience and nothing more

you do make me laugh, i reply with facts, information and stats, and you reply with questions and insults.

i numbered them out for you, do i need to spoon feed you the more detailed explanation of why the 7 points i listed are better handled with bitcoin than other currencies.

do you not understand anything that when the world has an inflationary currency, people actually want deflationary. do you not understand that when currencies are shutting down bank accounts or taking a 'haircut' from peoples accounts people want something in their 100% control. do you not understand that people want to buy things online that they dont want their spouses or strangers finding out about. do you not understand that investors want to store wealth in something that wont burn under fire or wont get recalled under marshal law. do you not understand taking $10k fiat across a border is automatic seizure and "policing for profit" yet transferring $1mill in bitcoin is instantaneous with no border guards ransacking your car or luggage.

if you think that bitcoin is useless. then please please use your miners and mine your $1 an hours worth of satoshi dust your getting and send it to 'seans outpost' as they will put it to better work and find more value in it then you ever would.

so i have a question for you. if you think its worthless and has no demand.. why are you even on this forum.

and as for using my coins to create a buy wall. i played that game in 2012, it was fun, i made more profit, but then i grew a backbone and realised the bigger picture.

while you cry babies are monitoring exchange prices like a hawk swooping and diving at every movement. i am making more money privately amongst the smarter people, and yes we are ignoring the hourly/daily changes of exchanges, as they are the small time things for the little guys. to be honest the sooner those exchanges die the better

Actually you started with the insults, I compose myself with the respect of other peoples opinions until they resort to insults, then I let loose.

These are not a true demand franky1) investments (tradable market hmmm? what have I been saying all along)2) unbanked (useless nonsense)3) blackmarket (usually only used by criminals so real world application does not apply)4) porn you wont want the wife seing on ur credit card (again inferior activities not a demand)5) gambling (again inferior activities not a demand)6) more fun to trade bitcoins than forex/shares/stocks (a complete contradiction to your whole post you said people are not trading on the market but rather person to person) 7) move funds easier and cheaper than western union/paypal/wire transfer (unless you use places like localbitcoin.com who use western union and wire transfer as a payment method after exchanging)

Your post is not filled with facts its filled with your opinion I was the one starting to throw facts using credible sites with thier stats, you didnt seem to like that either.

The things you deem as a demand are both not a demand and can easily be countered in other ways. Why do you have a need to take 10,000 dollars across the border, theres no reason for that unless you are conducting criminal activities, All the banking crap you mentioned does exist but its not enough to pressure people into trading their USD for Fiat because the risk of loss to exchanges or other places like MTGOX will never go away. People dont want to deal with the bullshit that comes with the banks but its better than loosing everything they have to more criminal people like exchange owners stealing your coins. If you need to buy things online without your spouse knowing about ti franky thats a personal problem it does not create a demand for a currency. My wife knows everything I do online and I am not bothered by that, sounds like you need a new spouse.And lastly "REAL" invewstors are not even in the bitcoin game, to many variables, to many risks, to much to lose.

And do you see how blindly stupid you are, Where did I say to put your coins on the market I said use your coins to create a demand, but you are so blindly stupid in your theories YOU (not me) are the one placing its value in its tradable market, no matter if that market is its exchange, person to person, black market. You do not have enough intelligence to even see how you can make a difference in your investment. I never said for you to create a buy wall franky I said take 100BTC and create a demand,there is a difference and shows you dont understand what a demand is. You instantly connected what I saidb for creating a demand with a buy wall. That is not what i was talking about at all. You and other "smarter" people like you are EXACTLY why the banks do not fear bitcoin!! and that, franky1, are the facts!! better get all your smarter friends together and get to work creating a true demand, i suggest you get a little better educated first in both currency trading and business economics as you will need both to complete that task!!!

Is it just me or does it seem like the bitcoin "craze" has died down a lot? Not as much people active in talking about it, and especially in other forums for altcoins, there used to be a lot of buzz and excitement but not any more it seems

If you think that bitcoin craze has died down, then you do not know what youre talking about. If you think that there is nothing to be crazy about bitcoin, maybe you need to research more about what is happening.2015 has been all good for bitcoin (although theres some hacking incident in Asia)

Nice to see a thread back from September where the volume, transaction rates, etc. really died down a bit! Right now, even if the price is still a tad lower, we're on the way up again it seems!

Yeh it was not the greatest of times bitcoin has had but not the worse either. We will soon get the guys on lurk mode out of the wood works when they see the price rising day in say out and news in their face.

At the moment a lot have probably been fed up getting scammed on altcoins losing money on bitcoin we are only human after all and not everyone can take the stress but have no doubt they will be back.

Yes and with respect to bitcoins, I only see this forum having active members who are earning and selling bitcoins for goods or products else reddit is one site where some people discuss about bitcoins. I was a member of another bitcoin forum that was very active in 2013 but it is almost dead now.

Nice to see a thread back from September where the volume, transaction rates, etc. really died down a bit! Right now, even if the price is still a tad lower, we're on the way up again it seems!

Yeh it was not the greatest of times bitcoin has had but not the worse either. We will soon get the guys on lurk mode out of the wood works when they see the price rising day in say out and news in their face.

At the moment a lot have probably been fed up getting scammed on altcoins losing money on bitcoin we are only human after all and not everyone can take the stress but have no doubt they will be back.

It has already reached $294 and soon it will go upto $300 but as far I can see, quite a few people use bitcoins while others who use PayPal or Payza aren't even interested in owning bitcoins as it is risky for them. If bitcoins do get adopted as a recognized currency, it will attract more users.

Yes and with respect to bitcoins, I only see this forum having active members who are earning and selling bitcoins for goods or products else reddit is one site where some people discuss about bitcoins. I was a member of another bitcoin forum that was very active in 2013 but it is almost dead now.

What other forum site is there about Bitcoin? Before I became an active member of this site and was still learning about Bitcoin, this and Reddit seemed like the only 2 communities that had decent activity.

What other forum site is there about Bitcoin? Before I became an active member of this site and was still learning about Bitcoin, this and Reddit seemed like the only 2 communities that had decent activity.

You know, I really think it boils down to what's meant by "craze". Too much hype ends us up in a bubble and we get the pump-n-crash cycle that we saw in 2013. Too little hype and everyone thinks "bitcoin is dying" and that's obviously not good either. In my opinion what we need is steady growth, steady appearance of new services/business, and steadily more adoption. I think that on the whole that's what we've been seeing for the last few years. However the speculation scene means that sometimes things get very crazy and I for one hope that that craziness doesn't override the core fundamentals of bitcoin which are truly exciting and revolutionary.

What other forum site is there about Bitcoin? Before I became an active member of this site and was still learning about Bitcoin, this and Reddit seemed like the only 2 communities that had decent activity.

What other forum site is there about Bitcoin? Before I became an active member of this site and was still learning about Bitcoin, this and Reddit seemed like the only 2 communities that had decent activity.

I'm not grasping your idea yet. Does it hide any information from the public network? What is the advantage?

If at least 50% of nodes validated transactions enough that old transactions can be discarded, then everyone saw everything and could keep a record of it.

Can public nodes see the values of transactions? Can they see which previous transaction the value came from? If they can, then they know everything. If they can't, then they couldn't verify that the value came from a valid source, so you couldn't take their generated chain as verification of it.

Does it hide the bitcoin addresses? Is that it? OK, maybe now I see, if that's it.

Crypto may offer a way to do "key blinding". I did some research and it was obscure, but there may be something there. "group signatures" may be related.

What we need is a way to generate additional blinded variations of a public key. The blinded variations would have the same properties as the root public key, such that the private key could generate a signature for any one of them. Others could not tell if a blinded key is related to the root key, or other blinded keys from the same root key. These are the properties of blinding. Blinding, in a nutshell, is x = (x * large_random_int) mod m.

When paying to a bitcoin address, you would generate a new blinded key for each use.

Then you need to be able to sign a signature such that you can't tell that two signatures came from the same private key. I'm not sure if always signing a different blinded public key would already give you this property. If not, I think that's where group signatures comes in. With group signatures, it is possible for something to be signed but not know who signed it.

As an example, say some unpopular military attack has to be ordered, but nobody wants to go down in history as the one who ordered it. If 10 leaders have private keys, one of them could sign the order and you wouldn't know who did it.

Is it just me or does it seem like the bitcoin "craze" has died down a lot? Not as much people active in talking about it, and especially in other forums for altcoins, there used to be a lot of buzz and excitement but not any more it seems

Never considered bitcoin a 'craze', the novelty may have worn off a bit but that's to be expected I suppose.

This is still a very active forum, no doubt they'll be another surge of excitement when the bitcoin price reaches another high point.